Linkedin OA
Question Details
You have just arrived in a new city and would like to see its sights. Each sight is located in a square and you have assigned each a beauty value....
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You have just arrived in a new city and would like to see its sights. Each sight is located in a square and you have assigned each a beauty value. Each road to a square takes an amount of time to travel, and you have limited time for sightseeing. Determine the maximum value of beauty that you can visit during your time in the city. Start and finish at your hotel, the location of sight zero.
Example:
n=4 (number of squares)
m = 3 (number of bidirectional roads)
max_time = 50
beauty= (5, 10, 15, 20)
road_from = (0, 1, 0)
road_to = (1, 2, 3)
road_time = (10, 10, 10)
Output:
30
To visit square 0, 1 and 2 (starting and ending at 0), time taken is 10 + 10 + 10 + 10 = 40 minutes and it has 5 + 10 + 15 = 30 beauty value (the beauty value is only counted on the fist visit).
Constraints:
1 <= n<= 1000
1 <= m <=2000
10 <= max_time <= 100
u[i] != v[i]
10 <= t[i] <= 100
No more than 4 roads connect a single square with others.
Two squares can be connected by at most one road.
Can you please help to solve this? The problem is easy to do for a tree, but I am not sure how to solve this when the graph is not a tree.
About This Question
This is a reported interview question from a linkedin interview for a swe role during the oa round reported in 2023.
It covers the following topics: Binary Tree, Graph .
Difficulty rating: Easy
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How To Practice This Type of Question
Solve similar problems on LeetCode under timed conditions (25-35 minutes per medium difficulty). The goal is pattern recognition: recognize the underlying technique (sliding window, two-pointer, BFS, memoized recursion, etc.) within 60-90 seconds of reading. Strong candidates verbalize their hypothesis out loud before coding, then iterate based on feedback. Weak candidates dive into implementation immediately, lose time on the wrong approach, and run out of time for follow-ups.
Companies update their question pools every 2-4 months. The exact wording of any given question may have been retired by the time you interview. Focus your prep on the pattern, not the specific problem. The patterns that appear in LinkedIn reports consistently are the ones worth investing in; one-off niche problems are not.
During Your LinkedIn Round
Apply the standard interview round template: clarify requirements (2-3 minutes), state your approach out loud and confirm direction with the interviewer (3-5 minutes), code with narration (15-25 minutes), test with concrete examples including edge cases (5 minutes), discuss optimization or trade-offs if time permits (5 minutes). This template is universally accepted across FAANG and adjacent companies; deviating from it produces weaker interviewer feedback signal.
The single most predictive failure mode in LinkedIn reports tagged "no hire": not asking clarifying questions. Interviewers are explicitly trained to weight this. Strong candidates ask 3-5 clarifying questions even on problems that look obvious; weak candidates dive into code immediately. The clarifying-question check is often the first signal recorded in the interviewer's written notes.